When I Discovered Latin American Literature

Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously. 

When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.

 

I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting – Vladimir Raevsky at The Guardian.

 

Did Edgar Allan Poe Invent Detective Fiction? – Thom Delapa at The Collector.

 

John Brown in Lake Placid – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War. 

A poem and a post at Literary Life

I have two features at Literary Life today.

One is a poem, "Imago Dei," that helps to introduce Literary Life's book feature in September, Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. The poem is inspired by this statement by L'Engle: "If the work comes to the artist and says, "here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve." The poem provides a little (poetic) explanation of the origin of a critical scene in my novel Dancing King. You can read "Imago Dei" here.

The second feature is post on fiction, "Finding Faulkner via Mexico and Peru." I never read William Faulkner until my mid-30s, and here I was, a born-and-raised Southerner. I discovered Faulkner after reading Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa and novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and other Latin American writers. You can read the post at Literary Life here.